Absent the shrieking partisan hysteria that we expect on the topic, the smartest advice for addressing gun violence slipped quietly under the radar this week.

This is a shame, since the suggestion put forth is not only sensible but politically feasible: Treat the epidemic of death and injury by firearms in this country like a public health crisis, and act accordingly.

The proposal, outlined Monday by three Harvard-based medical experts in the online Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests the same kind of comprehensive policy that has been used to reduce car wrecks, smoking deaths and accidental poisonings.

“These major achievements,” the authors write, “provide a set of evidence-based, successful tactics for immediate application to gun violence.”

This makes so much sense that it makes me want to fall into a chair, slap my forehead and wonder why I didn’t think of that.

It also makes me wonder why these proposals aren’t Exhibit A before Vice President Joe Biden’s task force, which is charged with coming up with quick policy recommendations in the wake of last month’s awful massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Sadly, the exercise so far has the pro forma feel of rounding up the usual suspects.

As expected, the participants are pretty much limited to victim advocates and gun control lobbyists one day; National Rifle Association representatives and firearms retailers another; a few Hollywood execs and video-game manufacturers thrown in here and there.

The result may be the hard-won tightening of a few restrictions and regulations but without much impact on the status quo.

Everybody wants to make sure there can never, ever be another Sandy Hook. I sure want to make sure that can’t happen again.

But Sandy Hook is only the splash of cold water in our collective faces that got everybody fired up. It’s not the status quo.

The status quo is revealed in the numbers, spread out in hundreds of police reports and ER charts and coroners’ records every day: 30,000 people killed every year in this country by guns, plus thousands more who survive their injuries. These numbers include homicides, suicides and accidental fatalities.

That’s 85 dead Americans a day. If a killer virus were carrying off that many people, we’d be screaming blue murder for a cure, a vaccine, a no-expenses-spared push for new research.

Well, professorial wonks and policy nerds don’t make for exciting news footage. The cameras are much more attracted to heartbroken parents of slain children or overwrought blowhards demanding a Pistol Pete or a Two-Gun Gertie at every bus stop and softball field in the land.

I fully recognize that such language as “a multicomponent initiative to modify sociocultural norms” is not a sound bite to galvanize us all to action. But it really is the wonks to whom we should be listening.

In “Curbing Gun Violence: Lessons From Public Health,” the Harvard trio cites specific actions that have saved American lives in the past and suggests ways they might be modified to apply to firearms.

The example set by better car design and tougher safety standards, for instance, might translate to “smart guns” with automatic security or locking devised.

Successful campaigns to deglamorize smoking in popular media could be adapted to movies and other entertainment forms. New taxes on gunsand ammunition could be used, like tobacco taxes, to fund safety efforts.

This isn’t the first time, of course, that this notion has been put forth. Several academics and researchers have patiently been saying that, with 300,000 weapons privately owned in this country, it’s the only kind of broad-based approach that can work.

Moreover, the proposals — which might (and almost certainly will) inflame Second Amendment absolutists unwilling to budge an inch — are in reality reasonable efforts to combat violence, not demonize responsible gun owners. That’s an important point.

“The distinction between ownership and violence is important for the design, focus and implementation of these strategies,” the writers said.

Firearms themselves are not the target, “just as automobiles and medications are widely used but are subject to sensible safety policies.”

Overwhelmingly, polls show an exhausted cynicism about the chance for meaningful reductions in American gun deaths, even after atrocities like Sandy Hook and the Aurora theater massacre.

Well, we have heard the weeping and the shouting. We have given headlines and airtime to absurd and unworkable demands.

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